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Christmas Music

Friday Dec. 23rd, 2011

Christmas is the one holiday that a person can sit down and listen to the same music year after year and never get entirely bored with it.

I like to blame “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and Burl Ives for making me nostalgic every time I hear old Christmas tunes. www.Pandora.com allows you to type in an artist like Burl Ives, and then it selects like-minded music electronically. Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Sinatra, and all the greats begin to chime in with minimal commercial interruption.

Rankin/Bass, the creators of the unique animation used in Rudolph and many other holiday hits, also made a very haunting Christmas special titled “The Nutcracker.” That one isn’t as widely known as their others, but along with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” by Tim Burton, they show a darker side of this famous holiday.

Whenever I hear the Rat Packers or classic crooners sing I picture the 1950s. The “A Christmas Story” time, and how charming everything was during that period. I wasn’t alive back then, but my father has a knack for putting on old home videos accompanied by Christmas music of the era every time we gather for the holidays.

When holiday music plays during the weeks before Christmas it can make snow falling look beautiful. It’s also still early enough in the season where you can say to yourself, “Isn’t it great living in a place where we get such amazing seasonal changes.”

The exception would be a year like this one when we don’t have snow. It makes me wish that Christmas was a bit later in the winter season when we are drowning in it with nothing to rejoice. Imagine if we celebrated Christmas in February and had the lights up for months. Sure a Christmas tree would die after a month or two, but the lights would be nice if they were up all winter.

I mean, what do we have to look forward to through all of these cold months? It gets kind of dreary for the winter with nothing to celebrate except maybe Valentines’ Day.

A friend recently placed Manheim Steamroller as a top band on their Facebook page. Just as I thought their head needs to be examined, I remembered my old timey tastes and understood. The Office recently did a nice spoof about that music when Dwight put it on and began to slam-dance with his coworkers.